by Barry Lopez
I stood up in the middle of the karigi and spoke quietly to the stone benches. I said where I was from, what my culture valued, and I recalled some of the worthy things my culture had done. Just a few sentences. I said I admired them, admired their success, and that this music I was about to play was what someone in our culture had created, and that for almost two hundred years my own people had considered it one of our greatest works of art.
I set the small tape player upright on the stone floor and pushed PLAY. The tinny, dimensionless sound unfurled in the cool air. I imagined in that moment that the sod houses around me were a herd of bison, turned in for the night on a grassy common. But with the robust assertions of the early chords of the First Movement, I began to sense my mistake. What I was doing seemed suddenly so incredibly ignorant that the brilliance of the music couldn’t suppress a sense of humiliation that began to rise in me.
I let the First Movement play out, Beethoven’s sketch of humanity’s struggle and triumph. I wanted to believe that what I was hearing was, in Richard Wagner’s words, “a struggle conceived in the greatest grandeur of the soul contending for happiness against the oppression of that inimical power that places itself between us and the joys [that are offered to us].” But in that moment those thoughts seemed irrelevant. What I had done was not simply ignorant. It was evidence of an arrogance I was mortified to discover in myself.
I turned the tape player off and stood there on the flagstone floor facing the empty benches for a few moments. I put the machine in my pocket. Nothing to be said, really. I desperately wanted to find words that would reestablish some common ground with the Thule ghosts. Instead, I apologized for my intrusion, thanked the audience I imagined sitting there for their tolerance, and retreated. I walked backward until I passed through the entrance to the karigi and stepped into the world outside.
Making my return over the ridge, I recalled how often in the past I had resisted the impulse to share those aspects of my own culture that I admired—our capacity for generosity, for example; our willingness to respond in an emergency—with members of a culture that had experienced the brutal force of colonial intrusion. I knew the only right gift to offer people in these situations is to listen, to be attentive. In those circumstances, giving in to the urge to say something is often only self-indulgent or self-serving. The voice of my culture has already been heard, repeatedly. Loudly. It would have been better that night to have sat at the entrance to the karigi in silence and let the hours pass.
I knew this, but in my earnestness, I forgot.
As I descended the south slope of the heights on Big Skraeling, my thoughts were jumbled. It was easy for me to understand how I had betrayed myself, that pride was what was behind it. What I couldn’t understand was the sadness pressing down on me, a sadness so deep it pushed aside the feelings of self-recrimination. Was it because I had to accept in myself the mistakes that can occur even when one has nothing but good intentions? Was it that my faith in the centrality in all cultures of “the beautiful,” in the primal importance of the numinous dimensions of life, and in the possibility of defusing the tensions in human societies around race and cultural differences was childish?
This terrible moment triggered a crisis of self-confidence.
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SOME YEARS AFTER this experience at the Sverdrup site, a mutual friend brought Arvo Pärt and me together at a house on the coast of Oregon, a few miles from Cape Foulweather. The Estonian composer and his family were renting the house for part of the summer, and our friend was hoping Pärt and I might embark on a project together. At the time, Pärt was trying to finish a large-scale piece called Adam’s Lament. Working on it, he told me, was a continuing struggle. He said he “did not have enough tears” to return to work on it just then.
Pärt’s music is austere and contemplative. Human suffering and Divine consolation are prominent in his compositions, and the resolution he sometimes finds is majestic. Our conversation, predictably, touched on compassion and despair in our personal lives and work. He described the political oppression he’d grown up with in the Soviet Union, a psychic wound that still had not healed, he said, though he and his family had recently moved to Berlin. We talked about the social responsibility of the artist in developed countries, where some people are impatient with intellectual complexity and opposed to the mixing of cultures, and where the intelligentsia were often suspicious of “beauty.”
At one point I tried to explain to him the effect a short composition of his, Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, had had on me. I told him about my experience at the Thule site, the collapse of self-confidence that had followed, and how difficult it had been to regain my composure. The source of my grief, I felt, was mysterious, but in the seven minutes it took me to listen to his Cantus for the first time, I said, my anxiety around this event gave way to peace.
I saw puzzlement in Arvo’s face. His English was not as good as his wife’s. Her English was excellent and she was helping us out. We were standing on a balcony overlooking the beach and the ocean beyond. Nora took hold of the front of my shirt and of the lapel of her husband’s vest and began gently rocking us back and forth. She began to cry, whispering, “Yes, yes, yes,” telling her husband he had been understood, telling me that what her husband composes can reassemble a person.
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THE AFTERNOON OF our last full day on Skraeling, I packed up nearly all of my gear so I wouldn’t delay our departure the following morning. I only have to roll up my sleeping bag, collapse my tent, and shove a few things into my duffel. The weather is damp, misty. I put on a pair of waterproof wind pants and pull on a waterproof anorak over a wool shirt and down vest. The wool pants I’m wearing have been repaired in three or four places. I once burned a hole in one of the socks I’m wearing, by putting it too close to the cookstove to dry. I’d had to stitch up a spot on the back of the vest where a sled dog had bitten me. The working history of these pieces of well-worn clothing is part of what makes them comfortable. The repairs are reminders to be careful.
I help sort and pack what remains of our food and protectively wrap artifacts from the sites. Peter and I make a last run in our inflatable Zodiac to the mouth of the Twin River to fill water jugs. It’s been on my mind to ask Peter why he thinks that the form of everyday tools either doesn’t change or changes only in minor ways over long periods of time, throughout Dorset history, for example. In Paleolithic caves in Cantabrian Spain or the Dordogne Valley in France, the style of Cro-Magnon painting doesn’t change much either, even over thousands of years. Why? It’s not the right time for this question, though. We’re having trouble hearing each other over the sound of the outboard engine, and Peter is trying to concentrate on navigating through loose pack ice.
I never follow up on this with him. There’s too much to do on our last day, too many details to remember; and Peter wants to get in one last session of concerted effort at one of the ASTt sites before the day ends. While we’re filling the water casks, however, a related cultural question starts to take shape in my mind. We’ve long known that biological evolution explains the development of myriad life-forms over time. Evidence for the geographical radiation of physical forms, based on a relatively few body plans, is especially prominent in fossil records from the time of the great biological extinctions at the end of the Permian and Cretaceous periods and, before that, perhaps at the close of the Precambrian eon. Scientists, however, have only recently begun to raise questions about the psychological evolution of any single species, because the evidence for it is not preserved anywhere and meaningful psychological evolution is generally not expected to have occurred except in the hominin line. Up until the end of the Pleistocene epoch, about 12,000 years ago, behaviorally modern Homo sapiens (as opposed to anatomically modern Homo sapiens) remains virtually unchanged for more than 200,000 years, although Homo sapiens has of course by then develo
ped various cultures far more complex than those of any of his hominin predecessors or relatives. Until nearly the end of the Pleistocene, Homo sapiens, like all other animals, had evolved almost entirely in response to the forcing pressures of his physical environment. Today, the rate of change in his cultural environment, especially the rate of change in the evolution of technologies like information processing, electronic communication, and artificial intelligence, has become so great that some in the older generations of the most technologically advanced societies have lost a fundamental rapport with people only a few generations removed from them. They process and evaluate information too differently.
Homo sapiens is now probably evolving more quickly in response to changes in his cultural environment than in response to changes in his physical environment.
To put this in other terms, perhaps in terms that are too simplified, questions about the history of Homo sapiens’s physical evolution have nearly been eclipsed in importance in the twenty-first century by questions concerning the evolution of the human mind. And by questions about how the cultural world of human beings—their art, economies, technologies, forms of government, and social organization—might reflect or influence human psychological evolution. While changes in the physical environment seem poised to have a significant impact on the physical evolution of Homo sapiens in the relatively near future through selective pressures exerted, for example, by global warming and exposure to industrial toxins and viral disease, the pressure being exerted on Homo sapiens by changes in his cultural environment is much more difficult to track or even discern. The urban cultural environment of major cities might soon become too electronically complicated for many older or rural people to effectively manage, and Homo sapiens might not have the ability to prevent a kind of chain reaction that will leave a significant part of the human population without the psychological resources to cope with the challenge of a physical environment suddenly hostile to human survival.
This of course is an apocalyptic vision, and also one based on an imperfect understanding of complex threats that remain poorly defined. It also ignores the capacity of human beings both to imagine and to build another environment, different from the one they find themselves in. But the setting on Skraeling Island—human survival with limited resources in a demanding environment, achieved by societies of practical and resourceful people—urges one to consider those unsettling moments in which an accomplished, professional person in a field like law or medicine becomes flummoxed by a world of electronic communication and information storage in which terms like “access,” “lost,” “authoritative,” “verify,” and “private” have come to mean something different from what they once meant. The usual dismissive reaction to this worry, to imply that there is nothing to be concerned about, one just gets a younger person to engineer the necessary exchanges, fails to recognize that the older person is potentially a reservoir of knowledge that will disappear if he or she is not one of those directly managing the nuances of an electronic exchange. And it fails to take into account the process of disintegration that has occurred historically in human societies where a dominant society effectively eliminates a smaller culture not through genocide but by simply ignoring its elders’ objections and focusing instead on converting its children. By inducing, or forcing, children to speak the dominant society’s language, and by installing them in civil service situations, where they often become indispensable as translators and negotiators, the dominant culture effectively erases their birth culture.
* * *
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DURING THE WEEKS I spent on Skraeling, it was the lifeways of the Thule and their predecessors, as I’ve said, that most preoccupied me, primarily the striking fact that they lived on the absolute outer edge of a geography that historically had rarely been inhabited by human beings, and that they nevertheless discovered, or invented, here, despite the cold, the dark, and widely scattered sources of food, the materials and ideas that worked for them. What they put their faith in, what images dominated their dreams, where love and beauty and tolerance fit in the thoughts of their elders, are things archeology cannot recover. These things might be intuited, however, in conversation with their progeny, the Inuit and Inughuit, or in conversation with elders among those cultures not so thoroughly separated from the world of the Thule as my own culture is.
In every culture in which I have encountered formal elders, the people who carry the history of what will work and what won’t, I find them to be among the relatively few people in those cultures adept at thinking and working outside the constructs of their own metaphors and myths, while at the same time attending to the ways in which their history is compelling them to act. They know the difference between a world that is being imposed on them and the freedom to choose the life they want. What upends elders is the seductive attraction of that imposed world—the allure of material comfort and wealth, the advertiser’s promise to satisfy every appetite. All of this they regard as venal. They see succumbing to it without questioning it, without resistance, as a desire to die.
* * *
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THE LAST DAY before a group decamps from a remote place is usually a helter-skelter affair. So many tasks to address, so many last-second decisions to make before the scheduled arrival of a bush plane or a helicopter which can’t be kept waiting long. I’m happy Peter has managed things in a way that gives us an additional few hours to work calmly at the Oldsquaw site. (Clangula hyemalis, once called oldsquaw, is now called long-tailed duck.) I like the orderliness of archeological work. Being familiar with the not-quite-boring techniques for effectively scouring the floor of someone else’s former shelter makes me feel comfortable and useful here. The possibility that something unknown might be revealed is exciting, the possibility that one of us might unearth an object that has not been exposed to light for more than a thousand years, perhaps a small Dorset carving of a polar bear’s head, cupped for all of us to look at in someone’s dirty, wind-chafed hand, swollen and pink from the cold.
Before we hike up from camp to work the Oldsquaw site for the last time, I visit the sheltered spot on Little Skraeling I’ve found above the Grave Rib site, the knapper’s station, where I finish a sketch map of where I’ve been on the island, so I can recall later where things were. And I search in vain for a small sheet of folded paper on which I’ve written the dimensions of the hut at Camp Clay, to stick in my Skraeling notebook. Was it a brass button from an officer’s tunic that I’d seen in the mud there that day? (Later, Peter says yes.) Considering some of the dwellings I’ve examined here, I try to recall what I’ve read of the Eleusinian Mysteries, the ceremonies of death and renewal Greeks performed at Attica 2,500 years ago, during the same years Early Dorset people might have been enacting a similar ritual about the inevitability of death and their hope for the return of light. An enactment of the Dorset Mysteries.
I consider again my sense that the Thule created out of the barrenness of this land and its darkness something aesthetically pleasing, that they might have viewed their dwellings, in fact, as appealing according to principles similar to the old Japanese principles of beauty in spareness, of shibui and yūgen. Perhaps they knew how to turn the darkness and the cold and the absence of life inside out.
I’m neither the disinterested observer on this island nor the skilled archeologist, only someone taking notes and making drawings on the edge of minor and major mysteries. Seven years before I came to Skraeling, I was camped with a small group of Inuit hunters on the sea ice of Admiralty Inlet, at the northern end of Baffin Island. They were hunting narwhal. The ice camp had been set up next to open water on Lancaster Sound where narwhal were milling, waiting for the ice in Admiralty Inlet to break up. I was involved with the gutting and butchering of these small cetaceans. Eskimos, in my experience, are generally not comfortable with a white man writing things down in a setting like this, where wild animals have given over their lives to the hunters. Too oft
en trouble follows, usually in the form of indictments from people in unrelated cultures who criticize the hunters as barbarians and condemn their way of life. For this reason I work up my notes only when I am alone in my tent, out of sight. Still, my hosts intuit my frame of mind, my way of life. They call me naajavaarsuk, their word for ivory gull.
Naajavaarsuk, a colonial seabird, is the only purely white seagull. But it wasn’t the color of its feathers that caused the Inuit hunters to choose that name. When seagulls crowd a gut pile on the sea ice, left there by polar bears (or Inuit hunters), it’s the larger gulls—Thayer’s gulls, great black-backed gulls, and glaucous gulls—that monopolize the offal, muscling each other aside. The smaller ivory gull tends to stand on the perimeter of the action, darting in to snatch something when there’s an opening. It was this way I had of actively participating, but then stepping back to observe what others were doing, that brought the first man to say naajavaarsuk.
* * *
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PETER, KAREN, AND ERIC ARRIVED at the Oldsquaw site soon after I did. Weeks before, they’d set up a string grid that divided the flat ground around the site into squares about twenty centimeters on a side. The squares are numbered and they’re keyed to numbered squares on sheets of paper. Anything found within a square is recorded on the matching square on that sheet. Like James Cook, with his lines of latitude and longitude, my companions had found a grid of squares helpful. The precision here implied that the coordinates themselves had a kind of authority.